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Getting a video displaying a lightbox indexed

We have created a video for a category page with the goal of building links to the page and improving the conversion rate of visitors to the page. This category is Christmas oriented so we want to get the video dropped in ASAP.

Unfortunately there was a mixup with our developer and he created a lightbox pop-up to display the video on the category page. I'm concerned this will hurt our ability to get the video indexed in Google.

Here was his response. Is what he says here true?

"With the video originally being in lightbox the iFrame Embed was enough since the video can't be on the page, it would have to be hidden on the page which is ignored by Google. The SEO would be derived from modifying the video sitemap to define the category page as the HTML page for the Wistia video and Google will make the association. The sitemap did all the heavy lifting, the schema markup did not come till later so it had no additional affect on Google other then to re-enforce the sitemap."

Without having explored the page and the sitemap, I would say that what your developer says is entirely possible and represents a good way forward from your situation.

Google have made a shift in the past few months with the way they index sitemaps - and if everything more or less matches up, even if they can't see the video on the page, they will often ascribe the page with a rich snippet and index the page as if there is a video present.

It's not surefire and having the video hidden beneath JS and delivered dynamically can prevent content being indexed - but it's certainly worth giving it a go (especially if you're using Wistia, as it's a simple process) and seeing if the video content gets indexed anyway. If it doesn't work, then I'd recommend going back and seeing if you can find a way to make the embed visible outside of the JS (perhaps just hide it with CSS and make it visible in a separate tab?). You could then have two methods of triggering the video playback for users if you wish.

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